How Buying & Selling a Home is Changing

In Ep. 130 of the Mullooly Asset Show, Tom talks about how the world of buying and selling a home is changing…drastically! Companies like Zillow are starting to dip their toes in the water of buying and selling homes, and it is shifting the industry.

Tom Mullooly: In episode 130, we’re going to talk about how buying and selling a home could be changing drastically. Stick around.

Welcome to the Mullooly Asset Show. I’m your host, Tom Mullooly, and this is episode number 130. Can you believe we’ve done 129 of these already? Anyway, in episode 130, interesting topic brought up about buying and selling a home, and how that could be changing. Some interesting things that we’ve read here in the office that we wanted to share with you.

Zillow, a site that a lot of people go to, they’re doing some things that are very, very interesting. We doubt that they’re the only ones in the industry. We want to cite a post, and we’ll put this in the show notes. We cite a post from a website called thebasispoint.com where it tries to connect Zillow with Netflix. Now Zillow, over the last couple of years, has moved from having home listings on the website to developing leads for lenders and realtors, and then they’ve just announced that they’ve gone into the home buying business. And now they want to get into actually selling homes and doing some financing for it.

And why not? If you go to Zillow’s website, you have plenty of company. In fact, last year, Zillow had 7 billion visits to their website. 7 billion. That’s crazy. So, last April, just about a year ago from the time we’re recording this, Zillow started buying homes directly. Their goal, ultimately, in the next three to five years, is they’d like to buy 5000 homes a month. A month. Over the next three to five years. Do you think they’ll be the only ones getting into this business? I don’t know.

Basically, if you want to list your home with Zillow, if you don’t like the price, they’re going to introduce you to a local agent. Which is pretty good because a lot of agents are just hooked into what’s going on in Zillow. And since 61% of home sellers are also buying a new home, you’re going to need a mortgage. Guess what? Zillow last year bought a mortgage company. And so they’re really starting to get into this whole concept of one stop shopping.

But wait, I’ve heard this phrase one stop shopping before. See, in the 80s, when companies would merge, they’d call it one stop shopping. In the 90s they started using that cool word synergy. Now, the word synergy is a joke. In the 80s, Sears … remember Sears? Sears bought Coldwell Banker and they also bought Dean Whitter. And the whole idea was, you could buy your socks and stocks in the same place. You could also get a home while you’re at it. Today, Quicken … remember Quicken? Just a little checkbook computer program? They developed QuickBooks. Then they turned into Quicken Loans. And now they’ve developed this company that advertises all over the place called Rocket. Rocket Mortgage, Rocket Loans. Then there’s also Loan Depot. They’ve already gotten into this one stop shopping approach. There’s a company called Knock, who will buy your home before you even sell your … they’ll help you buy your new home before you actually sell your old home. And help you move in as well. And Keller Williams, which has been around forever, has also added some mortgage capabilities as well.

Clearly, it’s not a recommendation in either way, buying or selling, when we talk about companies like Zillow, or any of the companies that we’ve talked about on this video or any videos. But the point that we’re trying to make is that the traditional way of doing business is getting destroyed by technology. Technology continues to melt the old business models. And so we’re seeing it in manufacturing, we see it in our own business, we see it in health care, we’re seeing it now in real estate.

Get plugged into what’s happening with these changes in technology. It is changing the world around us.

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